Last night I spoke at the Apple Store presentation of One Creative Scotland - an organisation which brings together musicians and artists in an effort to nurture and support their talent. Basically, they're building a community - so social media provide the perfect tools to grow this community online. 

MySpace has always been the network of choice for musicians and music lovers - but judging by the audience last night, it's losing popularity. Hue and Cry frontman Pat Kane said at the recent Media 140 event: "Use the ubiquitous to drive to the unique" and, having listened to the discussion last night, I'd agree that this is one of the best ways social media can serve the music community. Bands and performers need to use popular social networks to drive people to their performances. Here are 5 tips:

1. Establish a Facebook page or group and use the events tab to detail all your upcoming gigs.
2. Take photos of gigs, practice sessions, appearances and events and post them with tags. If you can, post video clips of the same to give a taste of what fans can expect live.
3. Set up a Twitter page of the same name and use it to drive traffic to your Facebook page or group by building relationships with journalists, promoters and potential fans and posting links back to your page or group. Use a URL-shortening service like bit.ly to track how many clicks these links are getting.
4. Establish a hastag for your band and ask all your fans to use it when they're tweeting about you. This should be a unique word or acronym and acts as a link to other tweets on the same subject. It's great for monitoring feedback and creates interest among other Twitter users.
5. Link! Do a bit of research to see who else is online doing something similar or talking about the same topics and check them out. Leave them a message or comment and they should do the same for you.

These measures should raise your profile, build your fanbase and drive more people to your gigs, which means more ticket sales in the short term and more success in the long term!